Peruvian American artist Sarah Elizabeth Cornejo uses sculpture, installation, textiles, and drawing to explore the ideas of hybridity and respond to a troubled present in the wake of humanity’s destructive path. Drawing upon Latin-American mythology and environmental urgency, her interdisciplinary projects challenge our traditional binary thinking - human and non-human, animate and inanimate, and living and dead - and examine the social consequences that result from our practice of operating from these categories. The work, which often includes bone, shell, fiber, and other natural materials create narratives that challenge our assumption of human hierarchy, testing the space between humanity, mammality and technology in a chimeric future.
Cornejo is based in Memphis, TN. Her work has been shown at The Mint Museum (NC), Duke University (NC), Crosstown Arts (TN), Field Projects (NY), and Antenna (LA), among others, and was most recently included in the statewide Tennessee Triennial. She has been awarded residencies at Crosstown Arts and McColl Center and received the Current Art Fund Grant (2021), New Public Sculptors Fellowship (2021), Tennessee State Fellowship (2022), and was the finalist for the 2022 Southern Prize. She received her MFA in interdisciplinary studio from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and her BA in Studio Art and English Literature from Davidson College.
This residency is sponsored by the Windgate Foundation.